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Miles Morales can still very ripely remember when he died; the first time, at least.
Black splotches had filled Miles’ stinging eyes and he squeezed them shut for a moment to try and get them to fade. He was exhausted from blood loss, silent tears slipping down his cheeks from the pain. It’s not like there had been much to see with them open, anyway. Just the same, stupid alley way he’d idiotically gotten stabbed in.
He’d been putting pressure on the wound, but it was bleeding too fast. Mami had told him once that, once a major artery was punctured, the average person had three to five minutes. And given he’s pretty much holding his small intestine in his palm, he’s pretty sure he’s got less than that.
In that, at least, Miles had been proven right. Before he could even finish counting to sixty, his knees had buckled out from under him. He crumpled against the hard, unforgiving ground.
Cold gripped him; icy claws reaching up from the ground as it sucked away at his warmth. As he tried to drag himself into the open; to somewhere he could be found, at least. The marrow-deep chill of blood-loss is familiar at this point. Yeah, as Spiderman near-death experiences are par for the course. And even then, Miles had known better than anyone, the gamble that one of these times, that ‘close call’ is gonna strike home.
—Even before he’d learned any of the rules to being Spiderman, even before he’d considered becoming Spiderman, Miles had learned the consequences of breaking the most important rule of all: Always get back up. His-Peter’s voice echoes in his mind: ’Yeah. I always get back up. Go. I’ll come find you.’ Lies. All of them lies. Because even then, Peter had known he was going to break that rule. He wasn’t going to get back up. He was going to die.—
The strange part, weirdly enough, had not been the part where he was passing out.
—‘Dying. He is dying, right now.’ His mind corrects logically. And then, nonsensically: ‘Oh god. He can’t die, he has school tomorrow. He has homework to finish. His parents, and- Spiderman, who will help people if I'm gone?’—
The strange part had come when his body finally gave out.
The air had been swimming. At first in small ripples, like heatwaves off hot asphalt in the summer, and then growing. Warbling more dramatically, like his favorite kind of street art; impressionist and bold, like to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. And then, through it something that could only be described as a portal emerges.
And then Peter was rushing out to greet him.
In that exact moment, Miles had been so sure he's already dead. That his… soul, his spirit, has reunited with his universe’s Peter. That this was his entrance into the afterlife.
It was a strangely nice thought. To not be alone, at least for this. He had never been good at being alone.
“Miles!” Peter shouts. “Oh god, kid, what happened to you,” he whispers in quiet horror. Miles couldn’t help feeling kind of offended. It’s not like Peter had been a particularly pretty sight when he died. His head smashed in, red matting blond hair, blue eyes gone grey-
Only- it’s not right. Peter’s eyes, the one in front of him, though glossy with tears, were dark. His hair too. His face was scruffy, and touch… familiar. A hand pressed to his wound- which made the pain spark so violently that all he could do is twist to try and cover the injury, completely reflexive. The sound that came from him was totally animal. He remembers hearing Peter swear, and then being hefted up into familiar arms; light as a feather.
Miles memories are harder to grasp after that. He recalls the wind against his cheeks, a feeling of vertigo, of movement.
Miles’ vision had gone completely dark by then, and he was cold —god so fucking cold— but he could feel the softness of a familiar pink bathrobe as he’s pulled to that broad chest. And then-
And then he’d woken up.
¶¶¶
Miles Morales can still very ripely remember when he died; the first time, at least.
It was kinda like riding a bike; he could remember the first time he did it, and a few of the most recent, but asking him to try and recall every single time he died... well it would be quite the process, to say the least.
And when Gwen portals into his room, when he first sees her, haloed by a rippling portal, Miles kind of assumes he’s died again. It would have been his most peaceful one by far — in his sleep. Isn’t that just the way?
And then he spends the next half hour swinging around the city, feeling more alive than he’d felt since- he doesn’t even know when. The last time he saw her, probably.
And then she has to go. And he doesn’t know to follow.
Spot disappears, then he reappears and causes so much chaos it’s impossible to figure out what to do. Spider people from other dimensions —portals pinging in his mind as familiar familiar familiar— jumping in.
It’s a battleground. Then, it’s a catastrophe.
When Spot kills him, he’s not even really shocked. It feels… expected.
¶¶¶
It’s been a hundred loops since then, and Miles is running out of ideas.
Here’s another secret:
Even though he does well in every class, Miles knows deep down that he must be that much stupider than his counterparts. How else could be miss, again and again ad infinitum, whatever vital detail it is that they seem to have caught. How do they do it so quickly? Before they get bitten, before their first portal, before they open their mouths to speak, even, they all just know. Miles has had endless chances, and yet he can’t ever seem to catch up. ‘Running to stand-still’, Mami has said, when she’s so busy in the hospital and every patient out is greeted with two more in. That’s him. Always running to stand-still.
¶¶¶
Miles thinks maybe, if he were more like the people he admired, maybe they would accept him. And then he gets an idea.
Miles has about an hour before Gwen gets there. He’d been zoned out the first time, half-dozing. But if he jolts himself awake fast enough- he has an hour.
Using that hour today, he gets a simple nose piercing —silver stud; nice and easy— at a jewelry store, and hair-dye at a bodega, and pays in cash at both. The bleach job doesn’t take very well, his hair is coarse and lightening it is harder than it seems. The bodega sink seems to retain more color than his hair does, but he manages to tint it reddish pink at the edges, at least. He pulls the black-converse out of the depths of his closet that he’d bought after seeing Gwen’s baby-blue pair, but never worn. They feel flat and boxy.
When Gwen finds him, he is careful, gentle, graceful in everything. Or at least he tries to be. But he’s not like Gwen. He stumbles at the wrong moments. Says the wrong things. She stays closed off, but he’s not pushing. The interaction stays delicate and cordial; Gwen has a look in her eyes the whole time that Miles can’t place. But it seems okay. They talk, they joke, and they laugh.
It’s stupid, but while Gwen is staring at the sunset, a part of him can’t help but stare lovingly down at his shoes, as they dangle off the edge of the tower. Laces wrapped around the ankle, secure and supportive. It feels like they’ve protected him, somehow.
He makes it farther this time; invisibly follows and watches as Gwen opens the portal, and in a moment of pure Miles, he follows her through. He feels like a marionette, pulled around on strings as a red cosmos passes him by. And then-
“Woah, copycat alert!” He meets Pavitr. And the dude is so energetic, talking a mile a minute. So much like Miles had been, once-
“You’re different than Gwen described. Did you dye your hair to look like hers?”
The look that’s been sitting in Gwen’s eyes the whole day, then snaps right into place. Uncomfortable, awkward.
“I didn’t…” Miles automatically tries to deny, even though it’s true. And yet, something won’t let him apologize. Doesn’t she see the imitation for what it is: the most sincere compliment he knows how to bestow?
He missed her so much.
He dies in Mumbattan, trying desperately to keep up with Pavitr’s rapid-fire everything- trying keep his cool- and then he just swings wrong, too focused on if his toes are pointed to notice. It’s quite possibly the most embarrassing way he’s died yet.
When he wakes up, Miles finds a salon with an open slot for ‘um, right now..?’ —not a reputable one by any means— and gets a relaxer treatment. It doesn’t take very well, his hair comes out kind of wavy-frizzy-smooth. He chats with the stylist the whole time, even when he doesn’t feel up to it. Stops a mugging on the way back to his bedroom, and greets Gwen like it’s hardly been a day since they last spoke. He moves through the world mimicking that bone-deep certainty that everything will turn out okay. It feels paper-thin on him, but the repetition has helped a lot.
Miles only stumbles when Hobie arrives, smashing through the barrier with a whip of chords that leaves Miles’ ears ringing. Jealousy peeks through the cracks at just how cool the guy is. Over-complicated hand-shakes and shadow-boxing with Pavitr, preforming practiced moves with Gwen like they’ve been fighting together for years. And maybe they have, for all he knows.
He dies when he tries to follow Pavitr’s philosophy; convinces himself that being Spiderman is easy, and just, jumps into the collider with Spot to see if they can talk things out.
And hey, Occam’s Razor, right? Can’t hurt to try.
It does hurt to try, actually. It hurts like fuck. Feels like glitching but a hundred times worse. He feels like he’s on fire, like he’s an overfilled battery leaking acid, hissing spitting and being torn in a million directions-
It hurts bad enough that when he wakes up, he immediately makes a grab for the trash-bin to throw up into. And spends the next hour shivering under the sheets; bad enough it convinces his mother he’s sick when she spots him in the kitchen making himself tea. He lies in bed for the next loop, feeling awful every second. Eventually the world ends outside his window. He closes his eyes and falls.
Miles doesn’t try at all for the next one. When Gwen pops out of his ceiling, Miles is emerging from his bathroom, toothbrush hanging off his lip and foam creasing his mouth. He throws a slouchy, stained hoodie over his spider-suit —look, he doesn’t actually own a bathrobe, and he’s not about to borrow his mami’s— and instead of swinging Gwen to the tallest, most impressive building he knows; he strolls by her side to the nearest joint and gets them both burgers. They sit in the sticky checker-print booth, and he levels with her, talks to her like he remembers Peter talking to him.
She still doesn’t open up.
He follows her again. Meets Pav and Hobie, and though neither of them say it out loud, they both look at him oddly; like they think he’s out of his depth. Or maybe they just think he needs a nap. And maybe he is. Does. Whatever.
He stands by as Inspector Signh dies, even as his entire body feels like its trying to revolt at the wrongness of it. Gives Gwen a subtle nod and shifts her protective leash on his wrist to actual hand-holding. He tries to feel okay with watching people die. He’s certainly getting enough practice.
And then, things go to shit anyways. The world shakes, and even Miles’ spider sense convulses. It's like standing too close to a subwoofer at a concert; feeling the underpinnings of the song shake.
And Pavitr's universe breaks apart.
Rage hisses under his skin, low and burning like a broken promise. He distracts himself by focusing on something he can fix. Bundling Pavitr up in his hoodie, firmly rubbing up and down Pav’s arms the way his dad used to when he was too cold as a kid.
Miles glowers into the spot he knows Jess’s portal will form. And he waits. And when it opens, and the question is asked; Miles shakes his head.
“I’m not leaving him alone,” Miles says, voice like iron. He notices how Gwen twitches; not quite a flinch, but it’s not not one either.
Jess tries and fails to strong arm him. Miles glitches- but manages to stay standing; he’s got experience with it now. That doesn’t make it hurt less.
Jess sighs and shakes her head, and tosses him a day-pass after Hobie says he'll stay with them; make sure Miles gets home. She’s focused on the canon event, clearly. Fine by him. Miles plucks the day-pass out of the air and snaps it onto his wrist with a veteran hand; never letting go of Pav, who’s trembling like a leaf. Hobie flicks open a portal to a nondescript alley.
Gwen goes with Jess. Hobie brings Miles and Pavitr back to his universe.
Miles doesn't immediately recognize that, though. He steps through, fully anticipating he’s about to be dropped off in his own universe. He tells Pav to keep his jacket; he’s got others. And tells Hobie how good it was meeting him. He steps through- and then he realizes.
He looks back at Hobie, who’s smiling at him. A shockingly gentle expression, all things considered.
He’s not sure why he thought Hobie would ever follow orders. It’s not a bad second impression, as these things go. Miles cracks a smile; it feels rusty.
¶¶¶
“I think I’m gonna try an' get some sleep,” Hobie says. His severely modified houseboat rocking under them like a bassinet. ”Whadda’bout you, mate?”
"What about me?” Miles says quietly.
Pavitr is dead-asleep, still bundled in Miles’ hoodie. His wrist and his watch stick out, smooth metal against mismatched blankets. Rotten, misplaced jealousy hollows out Miles chest, eating away at him like mold.
“You should get some rest, mate,” Hobie coaxes gently. His dark eyes brimming with unreadable emotion.
“‘Wish I could,” Miles says. And that’s all he says for a long time. Hobie doesn’t try too hard to coax him into conversation, but he does seem to find a check-up non-negotiable.
A thousand resets of time exist as barrier between Hobie’s gentle hands disinfecting the cuts, and any kind of pain he could feel from the boy wrapping his bruised knuckles. For a moment, all he feels is pity; It’s the kindest touch he’s felt in a hundred days of loops and Miles can’t even feel it.
Hobie heads to bed soon after. But first, he points Miles to his cabinet of pain meds — just in case he needs it, he says gently.
Miles turns on the shower, sits down in the tub under the spray. His suit is still new enough it bleeds black and red dye into the still water. He takes the bottle he pilfered from Hobie’s cabinet and stares at it.
He knows this isn’t what Hobie meant.
…He’s never had to do this before.
For all his many loops and many deaths, he’s never had to do it himself. The world feels eerily quiet, but his head is rushing like a waterfall. He can’t go to sleep. If he sleeps, all the deaths will stick. Everyone will pay the price for his failures.
The bottle is rattling in his hand. He’s shaking. He doesn’t want to do this.
But if he doesn’t, his dad- thousands of people from Pavitr’s dimension all die. Permanently.
This is his responsibility.
To get back up, you first have to fall.
He takes the pills four at a time, sipping sideways from the tap in between. The bathroom is small enough he can do that by just leaning up and out of the tub. Four at a time is the most his body will let him take — he’s always been bad at that. When he was a kid he couldn’t swallow pills, just gagged any time he tried and cried. But the alternative was liquid medicine, and he hated the cloying sticky cough-syrup taste. Mami had him practice with peas.
Theres a horrible solace to that — he’ll see them again soon.
They take a long time to take effect. Longer than he expected, considering his metabolism, so he takes apart Hobie’s razor too. He needs this to work. He’s sitting in Hobie’s tub, feeling nauseous as the blade hovers over his skin-
There’s a knock on the door, and Miles jolts.
There’s an instinctual ‘oh shit’ moment as he realizes the blade has gone a lot deeper than he had meant. The blade comes out and clatters down. Blood dribbles down and splatters onto the rug.
“Oi, Brooklyn. Y’bout done bruv?” Hobie’s voice is drowsy. “I gotta piss like a racehorse.”
Miles opens his mouth to say he’ll be out in a moment- then closes it. His hand had been pressing to the cut, instinctually staunching the bleeding.
“Miles? Y’ve been in there a long time. You good?” A pause. The door rattles, the lock holds. “Y’didn’t hit yer head, did ya?”
“I’m fine,” Miles says. It doesn’t sound like his own voice. With a slow hand, Miles removes the pressure. Holding it over the tub this time. No need to make it harder to clean up. Blood spills, thin red lines tracing down the side of his arm. Droplets spatter on the tub-wall, quick spatters. The shade is darker than the dye that bled off his suit.
"Are you gettin’ sick? You sound a little funky through the door.” The handle rattles again, harder. “Speakin’ of, can you unlock it already? We’ll keep the curtain closed n’ereythin’, but there’s only one bathroom o’ere and I-”
Miles feels like his heads under water. He stares a the red spots on the rug. It isn’t a particularly neat rug by any means, thread-bare and sort of an awkward yellow color. But it’s Hobie’s, and he’s made a mess of it.
“Sorry. I, uh, bled on your rug a little.” Is it cold or hot water and soap? He can’t remember for the life of him. Miles reaches out grab the rug and drag it under the spray with him — Start it soaking to Hobie can get the stain out. But the angle of his arm means it ends up pooling more blood onto the floor. He’s feeling drowsy. His fingers feel cold and tingly.
“Wait- What’re ya’bleedin’ for? What happened?” The door knob rattles harder. “Miles!” Hobie barks. The door knob stops. Footsteps move backwards from the door, and then-
Slam!
The door ricochets off its frame. Miles squints as the light from the hallway pours in. The shock on Hobie’s face is horrible.
“Bloody fuck kid- Is this- were you- are you-okay, wait, can you hear me? Bugger- that's a lot.”
Miles has known Hobie for a few hours, and yet hearing him so totally lost feels wrong.
Everything’s gone grey and fuzzy around the edges. Miles tries to speak, but his tongue feels like lead in his mouth.
“M’Sorry,” he slurs. He hurts, he feels cold.
“You got nothin’ to’pologize for,” Hobie says firmly.
Miles blinks. There’s a huge first-aid kit on the counter now, and Hobie has gauze pressed firmly to the wound. Pain sparks so violently through him that an animal sound chokes out from his throat. His body tries to curl around the injury.
“Jus’ breathe,” Hobie says. “In four, hold four, out four. This is bullshit. Holy shit. Are you breathing? Okay, okay. Okay. We're okay. Can you hold that? Yeah, good.” —Hobie’s hands are shaking as he takes Miles good hand and has him press down on the gauze. “Um, just keep it there, I need to call— Shit. I need to get someone here. Peter—? Fuck.”
He blinks again. The gauze has been soaked through, an ugly angry red. Then Hobie’s got a towel- and he’s speaking urgently into his watch.
“Um, yeah. Miles is- hurt. No- We're in the bathroom, 'a my- yeah. It’s, I wrapped it. Pressure on th’ wound- I’ve got’a towel. I looked—I tried gauze but it just soaked through — there's just so much and it's everywhere and I couldn' find nothin' and it's everywhere and I didn't know what to do and I didn't know, and I had to piss and—yeah, I can try. Fuck- I know. In four, out four. It doesn’t fucking help!" Miles winces at the volume, his head is throbbing.
"Just- just get here-“ Hobie pauses and wilts, checking on Miles again. “He's next to me, yea’. I’m- I'm pressing down. Hey, hey, can you hear me?” Miles grunts. “It's okay. I mean, it'll be okay, right? Fuck, I don't even know your blood type. Or mine. You’d think wit’ all this fuckin society crap they’d have somethin’ quick for shit like this.”
The call makes a sound like it’s dropped. They’re quiet for a moment.
“I’ve still gotta piss, by the way. Isn't that fuckin’ stupid?” Hobie laughs, it sounds shaky and hollow. “Stay awake, okay? That's like—a thing people say, right? Stay awake. Talk to me. — or, okay. Focus on breathing.”
And then, like a dream, the air warbles and a portal forms. Watching as Peter falls out of the portal hits a hundred nostalgia buttons in Miles’ brain, tears form and fall, hot down his cheeks.
“Miles!” Peter shouts. “Oh god, kid, what happened to you,” he whispers in quiet horror. And the deja vu is so strong that Miles wants to laugh. It bubbles in his throat like acid — and then he’s vomiting. Peter doesn’t seem to give a shit as he bundles Miles up. The shower must’ve been turned off at some point, but Miles is still sopping wet. Blood and water and bile.
“You’re gonna be okay Miles,” Peter promises. Miles’ vision has gone completely dark, and he’s shivering —god he's so fucking cold. "The Society's got a whole med-wing. I'll sneak you in. We'll- you're gonna be okay. You hear me, you're gonna be fine." Tears are running freely down his cheeks. One of them gets absorbed by the the softness of a familiar pink bathrobe as he’s pulled to that broad chest. And then-
And then he wakes up.
¶¶¶
Next go-around, Miles lays down a lump of cash —his entire under-the-bed shoe-box of savings— on a piercer’s front desk, and asks for ‘whatever they think would upset his parents the most’. The piercer, smiling wolfishly after counting the cash, gives him a brow bar, spider bites —which he immediately insists upon as soon as he hears the name, despite how terrifying it is to have needles going through his mouth—, and three ear piercings. They don’t hurt too bad, but it makes emoting… weird. Stiff, for a while, though not too noticeable with his spider healing. Next, Miles finds a thrift store, fishes a black, acid-wash jean jacket out of the bottom of a bin, and returns home. He looks up DIY tutorials, and gets as crazy and artistic as he can. Sketching out ideas before he practically dissects the jacket, tearing it apart at every seam.
With the small spray-cans of fabric paint Aunt-May gave him for his first suit, Miles sprays the design across the back of the jacket. ‘Original Anomaly’ it says, one word stacked on top of the second. Their first letters bleeding into each other in a slightly awkward anarchy symbol. He re-sews on everything except the sleeves, which he discards; weaving the red thread in subtle spider-web patterns over every piece. It’s nice, getting lost in the artistry.
When Gwen pops through the portal above his head, he’s only half-way done. So they spend time chatting and sitting on his bed, he talks about ‘the establishment’ and bleeds some honest frustrations — He deliberately trips her up a few times while they’re swinging through the city, angles his body one way only to swing the other. When they finally reach the top of the tower, Gwen stares at him like she doesn’t know what she’s seeing; like she can’t look away.
It feels good.
This time, when he meets the others, Miles holds nothing back — well except the time travel stuff, he’s open with every first impression and says exactly what’s on his mind. It’s hard, at first, turning off the filter that he’d spent his entire life fine tuning, shifting between stations —97.1 son-of-decorated-Officer-Morales, 101.9 street-artist-Miles, 100.3 friendly-neighborhood-Spiderman— so there’s never any static; never friction, never quiet.
Pavitr, while momentarily confused, cheerfully accepts his slap-dash fist-bump handshake. Hobie takes some time to warm up to him, wary; but seems to decide he’s alright, in the end. Particularly after he saves the girl and Inspector Singh and snarks at Jess for talking down to him as she orders them all to HQ.
He lasts the longest like this. Lasts right up until he meets Miguel.
And then, well.
His people-pleasing tendencies rear their ugly head as soon as they enter the giant halls of HQ, and he finds himself drawing in, getting quieter. His friends look worried at the sudden shift, and Miles does his best to reassure them. He smirks and snarks and offers strangers a lazy half-salute. He tries to be punk, to not care. But every glare he receives from Jess and Miguel feels like he’s a bug pinned under glass.
It turns out, it’s a lot easier to be punk when the ‘establishment’ you’re fighting is theoretical.
Still, he gathers himself and holds strong. He argues fiercely against Miguel and his ‘canon events’ from the moment they’re brought up, because it sounds like horse-shit.
He learns they want to let his dad die.
The guilt in Gwen’s eyes is raw.
Feverishly, he pokes hole after hole in Miguel’s theory until it's in pieces. He can approach this better in the next loop, but he has to know- He asks to look at the data they gathered, and Miguel refuses him. He starts asking the spiders appearing in the room about their experiences, and Miguel starts to yell at him, calling him an insolent, naïve child. Telling him he was never mean to even be Spiderman. If he weren’t here than his Peter still would be, and Miles-
—And Miles wonders. If he can’t die, did his Peter even need to save him? If he were braver, had leapt into the fray, taken the hit and died there, would he have been sent back? Would he have been able to stop the collider from bringing everyone into his dimension in the first place?
…Does this mean that his Peter died for nothing?—
Anger courses through him. It’s sharp and violent and most of it isn’t even anger at Miguel, it’s loops and loops of tangled emotion, injustice and hurt and loneliness all stacked on top of each-other in a big coat like a kid trying to get into an R- rated movie; pretending so they can be let in somewhere no one wants them. It feels wrong, but he doesn’t care. Because anger makes them take him seriously, makes them wary. Rage this hot feels scary, and good. Especially when his electrified fist slams into Miguels jaw. Hard.
Jess and Gwen go from jaws-on-the-floor to dragging him back in a split second. Even Hobie looks shocked at his gall. There’s blood on Miles knuckles; not visible, but he can feel it when he flexes his hand. Wet.
And then Miguel twists. All red-feral-eyes and drawn-sharp-claws, and takes him by the collar. Slamming him into the wall and snarling incomprehensible venom.
His spidey-sense screams; but the anxiety that’s been eating away at him the entire time drowns it out. Miles spits in his face. And when the swing comes, he’s too busy standing his ground to dodge.
It’s strange. He’s hazy from blood-loss, Miguel’s claw marks gouged deep across his chest; and one just high enough to have caught his neck; the jugular vein spurting like a sick fountain. Watching as his friends crowd his body. As Miguel’s face shifts into one of realization and abject horror- as Hobie fucking lunges at Miguel, screaming bloody murder and Gwen frantically tries to staunch the bleeding without strangling him…
It’s strange, but the thing Miles is most disappointed by when he dies this time, is the fact that his jacket is ruined.
¶¶¶
Let’s do this one more time.
Miles wakes up, and he contemplates trying to be other people. Mimicking Noir or Peni, maybe even Ham. He laughs at that mental image, and then he cries.
He goes back up to the party. Talks to his parents, hugs his dad. He misses Gwen completely — That’s not true. He spots her white silhouette out of the corner of his eyes, he feels her resonance at the edge of his senses. He pretends; he’s getting better at that though.
He spends his hour, then the day with his family. Eating and pretending. Putting on a good show. Mami isn’t convinced, he can feel her eyes on him as he mills about; but the sky opens up in a Swiss-cheese of black holes before she gets the chance to confront him.
His dad dies.
His dad is dead. He looks so much like Peter- his Peter did. Dust-covered pallor, red on the rubble, sprawled with glassy eyes. He curls over his body — still warm.
“We can’t save everyone,” someone says. Gwen or Noir or Porker- he doesn’t care. A pulse of electricity arcs off his back, scattering hot blue arcs like lightning. He doesn’t want their comforting touch, doesn’t want their concerned, pitying eyes. He doesn’t want them to be here. He doesn’t want this to have happened- None of this should have happened.
“Spider-Man can do a lot of things,” Peter says. “But even we can’t undo what’s been done.”
Miles throws himself at Spot — they meet in the air. A black hole and a supernova. And the last thing Miles feels is rage.
Then he wakes up.
¶¶¶
His mom dies next. She wasn’t even supposed to be in the area, the last three times, in fact, she wasn’t. She’s supposed to be at the hospital, treating the injured from this fight, saving people in her own way. But this time- something’s changed. Maybe she was with Jeff when he got the call in. Maybe something else. But she’s here — She’s trying to help an injured man out of the rubble. Nobody’s watching her back. And a chunk of rubble comes down-
His mom is dead. And Peter says that same stupid fucking speech: “Even Spider-Man can’t undo what’s been done.”
But he’s wrong. He’s wrong and Miles has proof. He is proof- And-
Miles runs. He runs and he swings and he finds the highest ledge he can-
The ground meets him with a kiss.
And he wakes up.
¶¶¶
“You’re awful smiley,” Gwen comments as she sits down next to him, bumping her shoulder against his. They’re on the tower, again. He’s in his own clothes. The world feels quiet in the cold wind.
“I was gonna go to Princeton for you all, you know,” Miles says, unable to wipe the sad smile from his face.
“For us?” She asks.
Miles is nodding before she has the second syllable out. “They have one hell of a physics program there.” He explains. Her eyebrow twitches up, but he just leans back on his hands; casual. Just watches her out of the corner of his eye. “I thought, if there’s any place in the world I could find the know-how, and the parts and the- the everything, to build something that could reach other dimensions safely… it’d be there.”
She reacts pretty much how he expected she would: Her shoulders hike up. She turns away. Stares at the skyline. Miles can tell by how her cheek has hollowed out ever-so-subtly that she’s biting the inside.
“I wanted to see you so bad, Gwen,” he confesses, quiet and painfully earnest, even to his own ears. He knows he’s picking at a scab. The sting of reopening the wound is satisfying, in a way.
He can’t help himself, he wants to know how she’ll respond.
Disappointingly, however… she doesn’t. She says nothing.
He sighs, long and drawn and wistful. He stands.
“Come on, then,” he says, holding out a hand. “We’ve got a tour to finish, yeah?”
She takes his hand, but allows him to take none of her weight. The appearance of help without allowing the burden of it.
Even with her hand in his, it’s like she’s not even there. Ghost-spider indeed.
¶¶¶
Gwen sets him up for jokes. He’s happy to repeat them. It always seems to settle something in her eyes. And Miles is left to wonder how much of a stranger he must seem like, what’s showing deep in his eyes, in the cracks of his well-polished facade, that is making him so unrecognizable. But as soon as he has the thought, he shuts it down. Inwardly terrified that he’ll start seeing it too, in his own reflection.
He does it again. And again. It feels a bit like sleep walking, even though Miles hasn’t slept in what feels like a year. A more accurate description is probably learning choreography, or fighting the same boss-battle in a video game over and over again, running the program again and again, gaining inches of ground every time.
The days pass and he maintains this rhythm. He wakes up, stares at the ceiling for an hour, chats with Gwen and swings around the city. Goes with Gwen through the portal, lets her yell at him so he can watch her and Pavitr’s backs as they sling after Spot, but he doesn’t watch his own. He dies. He breaks into the collider with a venom strike that gets easier every time, but is never fast enough. He dies. He bonds with Hobie, tries and fails to stop Spot, and isn’t quick enough to dodge the falling rubble. He dies. He saves inspector Singh and hauls the bus back from the ledge, and endures the consequences of trying to do both- do it all. Miles is always tempted to cut it there. See if Hobie would let him drop in and take a nap in his universe, so he doesn’t have to keep repeating the same fucking morning — but unless Miles lets inspector Singh die, Jess hauls them off to Nueva York immediately. They go, and Miles gets lectured, and trapped. Once or twice, Miles lets himself stay captured, only for Spot to rip the whole cell block into pieces to find him. He dies. Occasionally, Miles will get through the chase and make his way to the go-home machine.
The one uniting factor is that Miles dies horribly each time. But he’s getting used to that.
He has no idea how this power of his works; not that he’s had much opportunity for testing. A part of him is terrified he’ll find out he’s not retracing time, but hopping between slightly different dimensions. And he’s actually been leaving a trail of increasingly pathetic corpses behind in each dimension as he jumps to the next. Inhabiting the next body like a parasite until he dumps this one too.
Nothing physical carries over though, that’s the rule he’s come to live by. Piercings and injuries alike. So every day he ‘wakes’ in his bed from a nap he hadn’t really meant to take, exactly as well rested physically. But he can feel himself deteriorating anyway. He’s not progressing fast enough for the repetition to be worth it. His goals are narrowing down to smaller and smaller pieces. He’s running full days just for a two characters of Miguels passwords, or a glimpse of code he hardly understands anyways; memorizing it to input it later.
It’s the literal definition of insanity, he knows. But some animal thing inside him keeps telling him it’s safer this way; that only once he knows all the variables, can predict everything, his plan will succeed. Or maybe it will just stop working one of these go arounds. He can feel himself deteriorating, he’s never gone this many loops in a row. This is unchartered ground.
He feels like water, fluid and dynamic and following the path of least resistance. He would take asylum in insanity, if only his admission to the wards would stick.